Hetch Hetchy undammed, 1987

[OHC]

For those unfamiliar, the Hetch Hetchy Valley lies towards the northern end of Yosemite National Park. Formed by the Tuolumne River, which flows from the glaciers of the Sierra down into the Central Valley of California, it resembles nothing so much as a smaller version of the famous Yosemite Valley itself. There’s one main difference: the Hetch Hetchy is full of water. It was dammed in the 1910s to provide drinking water and power for the City of San Francisco, after an epochal political battle between wilderness advocates and Progressive Era technocrats. John Muir opposed giving away public land and drowning the alpine meadows. (“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the peoples’ cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has been consecrated by the heart of man!”) Pro-development conservationists like Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot sided with San Francisco.

Pinchot’s side eventually won out, and Congress granted permission for the city to build its dam on federal land. (Teddy Roosevelt had vetoed the proposal twice, but Woodrow Wilson was more than happy to sign it.) The issue became history – until 1987, when Interior Secretary Donald Hodel proposed demolishing the O’Shaughnessy Dam and returning the Hetch Hetchy to its original state.

This was a bit of a surprise. Ronald Reagan was obviously no friend to the environment; his first Interior Secretary, James Watt, famously did not even believe in prudent use of natural resources, because he thought the Rapture was on its way and Earth would be abandoned within a few years. Hodel wasn’t much of an environmentalist either but he did have a soft spot for outdoor recreation and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of restoring the Hetch Hetchy.

While environmental advocacy groups expressed cautious interest, there was an outcry from San Franciscans, who had come to see clean Tuolumne water as their birthright; Dianne Feinstein took up the issue and engaged Hodel in public debate atop the dam itself. She eventually won the battle. The project quietly faded from the news again and the plans gathered dust in Interior’s records. While the issue’s come up occasionally since, it’s never received the same amount of attention. In 2012, the dam’s opponents managed to get a measure on the ballot in SF requiring the city to study alternative water sources, and it was rejected 77% to 23%.

If Hodel had stuck to his guns, could he have been successful in getting the dam removed in the 80s? It might be a tricky ask legally. Unlike most dams on public land, the O’Shaughnessy is owned and operated not by the federal government but by the San Francisco Public Utility District. The city would never agree to give up the dam, so the only way for the government to confiscate it would probably be to repeal the Raker Act, the original federal law granting water rights to SF. It sounds like a difficult proposition to get through Congress and a political fight the Reagan administration would be unlikely to pick. Maybe conservatives could be persuaded to agree with it to get one over on the libs in SF!

But setting plausibility aside, what would happen if the dam was removed?

• Interior’s study proposed a few different strategies for restoring the valley.
  • Some involved basically creating a fake wilderness – scrubbing off the “bathtub ring” of sediment on the rocks, removing all the ancient stumps from the valley floor, planting native species in pleasant arrangements. (This would probably be the Reagan administration’s preference, as it would more quickly promote tourism and commercial development.)
  • Other ideas, generally preferred by the ecologists who drew up the proposals, suggested just letting the vital force of nature restore the valley without human intervention.
  • Whether the end result is a net positive or negative for the environment would probably depend upon whether or not Interior built the kind of intensive tourist infrastructure there that has dirtied up the Yosemite Valley.
  • An intriguing idea: the original parklike environment John Muir encountered in the Hetch Hetchy was partially the result of controlled burns by the Paiute and Miwok. If the desire was to recreate the original alpine meadow ecosystem, the Hetch Hetchy could actually become a great test case for the reintroduction of indigenous fire practices, which are sorely needed to prevent disastrous megafires.
• San Francisco wouldn’t dry up for lack of water – there are other reservoirs along the Tuolumne that the city is legally entitled to a share of but currently does not use. These reservoirs, however, are nowhere near as clean as Hetch Hetchy snowmelt, and the cities that use them (like Modesto) have to treat and purify their water extensively. It would doubtless be expensive and result in a slightly lower quality of drinking water for the Bay.
• Would the conflict accelerate or hold up the movement to remove America’s many unnecessary dams?
  • Maybe demolishing one of the most totemic dams could “normalize” it, to use an overused word, and get the ball rolling on a process that’s been much delayed IOTL. More dam removal across the country means better fish habitat, better quality of life for many indigenous peoples, and an overall healthier biosphere. (Most dams proposed for demolition aren’t the ones productively generating lots of electricity – they’re either used for irrigation or are relatively obsolescent.)
  • On the other hand, the O’Shaughnessy is honestly not one of the most destructive dams out there. It’s not blocking any fish runs on its own because it’s the second-last of many dams on the Tuolumne, and it does serve a productive purpose. Could its demolition turn bougie-liberal SF against dam removal and thus split the environmental coalition? Some skeptics thought that that’s exactly what Hodel had in mind…